First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Unlike other presidents’ wives who felt motivated by their new visibility to make themselves over, Lou Hoover seemed to retreat even from the accomplishments she had. Learning a new language, high on the agendas of many First Ladies, held little urgency—she already spoke five—but when questioned about her ability, she equivocated. Other White House chatelaines had embarked on ambitious buying trips to outfit themselves beyond criticism, but Lou, whose bank account would have allowed for any extravagance, paid little attention to clothes. Rather than attempting to slice a couple of years off her age, she seemed to take pleasure, one maid decided, in looking like the grandmother she was.126

  The White House staff found the new First Lady a contradictory mix of international customs and small-town America. At Christmas, when she arranged for the family to trek through a darkened house, the girls and women ringing handbells and the men and boys carrying candles, the staff dismissed it as “ghostly” and “another of Mrs. Hoover’s ideas.” Although she had a reputation for liking to talk (servants called it “broadcasting”), she relied on hand signals during official parties to communicate with employees.127 Each dropped handkerchief or raised finger carried a specific command: move the guests more quickly through the reception line, or more slowly; replenish the punch.

  What Lou had concocted as an efficient innovation—or perhaps a variation on the dressage exercises she learned as a rider—appeared to the staff as dehumanizing and complicated. They had trouble “reading” her, they complained, and sometimes waited carefully for a particular signal and then missed it because of the subtlety with which it was delivered. Nor did they like her instruction that they stay out of sight. Bells rang to announce the president and his wife when they passed through the halls of the private quarters, warning employees to dart into the closest nook or hiding place. After four years in the Hoover White House, some employees could count on one hand the number of times they had actually encountered face to face either the president or his wife.

  More than one disgruntled White House employee complained in print about the Hoovers’ uncaring treatment. The housekeeper, Ava Long, described how “company, company, company,” often arrived on such short notice that she had to contrive out of leftovers enough servings for dozens of people. On one occasion she had shopped for six, only to learn at 12:30 that forty would arrive for lunch at one. She instructed the cook to grind up all the icebox’s contents and serve the result as a croquette with mushroom sauce. When one guest requested the recipe, Long dubbed it, with a touch of sarcasm, “White House Surprise Supreme.”128 The Hoovers liked company so much, the housekeeper reported, that they dined alone only once a year, evidently oblivious to the work they imposed on their employees. Eventually Long quit the job, and her colleague, the head usher, singled out the Hoovers as among the least likeable of his bosses when he published Forty-Two Years at the White House.129

  Other observers praised Lou Hoover’s interest in people as her greatest asset. She was indefatigable, they said, in her willingness to welcome groups to the White House, and in her busiest year (1932), she gave forty teas and received eighty organizations.130 Camp Rapidan, the Hoover retreat in the Shenandoah Mountains, became an extension of the capital when Lou Hoover invited representatives of the Girl Scouts to accompany her there or used the camp as a setting to speak by radio to the country’s youth. Much of her generosity, including funds for a school for poor children near Camp Rapidan, was supported by her own pocketbook.

  A very deep prejudice against publicizing her personal life kept secret from most Americans the more appealing side of Lou Hoover. She shared with her husband a deep resentment, he later wrote, “of the intrusion of the press and public into our family life.”131 Even he did not know, until after his wife died in 1944 and he was settling her estate, how many people benefited from her largesse. Some of those whom she had supported regularly for years wrote when their checks stopped, wanting to know what had happened. A desire to protect the privacy of people she had helped contributed to the decision to keep her papers closed until forty years after her death.132

  What makes Lou Hoover’s attitude toward publicity more intriguing is her willingness to take a public role as First Lady. Recognizing the value of radio, which had begun to carry inauguration ceremonies in 1925, she arranged to speak to a nationwide audience. She even set up a lab on the second floor of the White House to “test” her performances and “improve [her] talkie technique.”133 A speech professor who later analyzed recordings of the talks judged Lou’s voice “tinny” but admitted that the equipment was poorly adjusted for women’s voices since so few of them had the opportunity to use it.134

  Unimaginative in phrasing, Lou’s radio speeches to young people had a definitely feminist slant. On a Saturday evening in June 1929, when she spoke from Camp Rapidan to a group of 4-H club members, the National Broadcasting Company carried the message coast to coast. After praising the joys of camping, Lou urged her listeners to help make their homes more attractive places, a responsibility, she said, “as much the work of boys as of girls … . Just stop a second to think what home is to you. Is it just a place where mother and the girls drudge a good part of the day in order that father and the boys may have a place to come to eat and sleep? [Everybody should help] with dishes, sweeping.… Boys, remember you are just as great factors in the home making of the family as are the girls.”135

  In other ways, Lou Hoover exerted a surprisingly modern and liberated influence on her husband’s administration. She invited noticeably pregnant women (who had traditionally been excluded) to join her in reception lines,136 and she encouraged women to pursue individual careers. When her husband issued Executive Order 5984 in December 1932, it amended the Civil Service Rule VII to require nominations “without regard to sex,” unless the duties to be performed could be satisfactorily performed by only men or women. At least one careful student of the Hoover record believes that Lou influenced her husband’s decisions in this and other matters.137 In his single term, President Hoover named seven women to positions requiring Senate approval, bringing the total up to twenty, double what it had been in 1920.138

  A woman of such intellectual bent and feminist persuasion might be expected to take a dim view of the requirement that a First Lady had to greet anyone who wanted to visit her, and Lou did. After shaking the hands of more than four thousand people at one New Year’s reception, she abandoned the ritual that had originated with Martha Washington. Her husband explained that her “rigid sense of duty” stopped her from abolishing other receptions: “To her it was part of the job.”139

  On matters delicate to the Washington political community, Lou Hoover preferred to increase her work load rather than offend anyone. She knew she was there to ‘‘help Bert.” When a protocol feud erupted between Dolly Gann, prominent sister of the vice president, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, longtime leader in capital society, Lou gave two parties so that neither would be assigned precedence over the other. Such a solution caused one New York Times reporter to announce “a particularly Quaker victory.”140

  When time came to entertain wives of congressmen, Lou Hoover had to decide what to do with the wife of Chicago congressman Oscar DePriest, the first Negro to serve in the legislature since Reconstruction. No black had been a guest at the White House since Theodore Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington in 1901, and Lou Hoover understood that an invitation to Jessie DePriest could bring unpleasant repercussions. She sounded out a few of the other wives, found twelve who would not embarrass the congressman’s wife, and then gave a separate tea for them.

  When word of the invitation got out, several Southern publications objected that Lou Hoover had “defiled” the White House, and the Mobile Alabama Press reacted bitterly: “Mrs. Herbert Hoover offered to the South and to the nation an arrogant insult yesterday when she entertained a negro [sic] woman at a White House tea. She has harmed Mr. Hoover to a serious extent. Social admixture of the negro and the white is sought by neit
her race. The negro is entitled to a social life but that the two races should intermingle at afternoon teas or other functions is inadmissible.”141

  Lou Hoover’s decision to follow through with the DePriest tea, in spite of criticism, reinforced her reputation as extremely egalitarian. She drove herself around Washington and invited a wide variety of people to dinner, causing one reporter to note: “She does not keep the rules, [but] mixes the great and the near-great with the obscure and the near obscure.”142

  A woman willing to brave so much controversy might have been expected to open up to the press, but she was far less open with reporters in the White House than she had been in her early days in Washington. She refused to permit either interviews or casual photographs. Her grandchildren, who resided in the White House for a few months while their father recuperated in the South, were strictly off-limits to journalists. The formal, posed studio portraits that she released, showing a perfectly coiffed, distant matron, did little to render her human or compassionate.

  The Hoover White House provided such a dry spell for thirsty reporters that one of them, Bess Furman of the Washington AP, contrived to enter the family quarters by passing herself off as a Girl Scout Christmas caroler. Dressed in the traditional uniform, hair tucked under her cap, Furman went in “as one of the taller girls” and moved undetected within arm’s reach of people who encountered her everyday as a reporter. During the carols that she could not sing, Furman kept her face down, furtively taking in details so she could write an account of how a president’s family celebrated Christmas. In a burst of bravado, Furman sent a copy of the article to the First Lady, who marked it “nice story,” without ever discovering who supplied the details.143

  Lou Hoover’s reticence in the White House extended to policy matters as well as publicity, thus underlining the traditional side of her view of a wife’s role. If she differed with Herbert on any significant matter, she kept the difference to herself. She tailored her own suggestions for economic recovery to fit her husband’s remedies, and her public pronouncements on how to end the Great Depression reinforced her husband’s reputation for relying on volunteerism. In March 1931, when the country edged towards the trough of unemployment, she went on radio to thank American women for their donations of food and clothing. The First Lady urged women to volunteer in one of three ways: by identifying people in need and determining how they could be helped, by working in hospitals and visiting-nurse programs, and by setting up recreation opportunities for unemployed young people.144 Even after Herbert lost the 1932 election (and Lou heard that one indignant mother had changed her young son’s name from Herbert Hoover Jones to Franklin Roosevelt Jones), she took to the airwaves to encourage “every woman in America … to consider herself a volunteer associate member of the National Women’s Committee of Welfare and Relief Mobilization … [because if people cooperate there is] ample food and clothing for us all.”145

  More than most of her predecessors, Lou Hoover had exceptional ability and training for leadership, but she failed to win the country’s approval or its interest. She foreshadowed Eleanor Roosevelt in her formidable energy and active participation in her husband’s presidency. Alice Roosevelt Longworth (who was never particularly charitable to her famous cousin) credited Lou with being the first president’s wife “to take a public part on her own.”146 But Lou’s natural reticence unfortunately isolated her, so that, while she set the stage for Eleanor’s accomplishments, she came nowhere close to equalling them.

  Lou also lacked Eleanor’s willingness to take risks. While Eleanor did not hesitate to disagree with her husband or introduce guests who would question his ideas, Lou preferred a safer course. She protected Herbert by inviting guests for his pleasure rather than for his growth, and then she diverted conversation from difficult topics. While other presidents’ wives sought to watch out for their husbands’ health, Lou gave the impression of standing guard against challenges to Herbert’s thinking—challenges that might have moved him in other directions than those he took.

  The contrast between the two women is underlined in the letter that Lou Hoover wrote to her sons and husband not long before her death in 1944. It is a message that could not have come from Eleanor’s hand. Even from Lou, it startles. The woman who started out camping and fishing like a boy, and then proceeded to earn a geology degree equal to her husband’s, ended up describing her life as entirely peripheral to him and their sons: “I have been lucky,” she wrote, “to have my trail move alongside that of such exceptional men and boys.”147

  Together, the three First Ladies of the 1920s reflect that decade well since they present contradictions and inconsistencies rather than one clear line of development. But they also form a bridge to the period that followed, and it is difficult to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt initiating the changes she did without the foundations laid by her immediate predecessors—in experimenting with the press, speaking out on important issues, and extending women’s rights and opportunities.

  7

  Breaking Precedents and Reaffirming Old Ones (1933–1961)

  EVEN BEFORE THE 1932 presidential election, Eleanor Roosevelt (1933–1945) made clear that she meant to break some precedents if her husband won. Just how much she was responding to the special urgency of the Great Depression remains unclear. Perhaps she would have been just as active and innovative a First Lady if her husband had presided over a prosperous nation. But most Americans in 1933 were neither prosperous nor optimistic. The previous summer, midwestern farmers, disgusted by the low prices they were receiving, dumped their milk. Then thousands of jobless veterans marched to Washington and set up camps of shacks and tents, dubbed Hoovervilles. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took his oath of office in March 1933, many of the country’s banks had closed and business halted. Young children in the largest cities learned to walk past furniture, sidewalk-stored, of their dispossessed neighbors and to expect that one day they would return from school to find their own things there.

  Surely such times called out for new approaches, and Eleanor Roosevelt complied on several fronts. She had hinted during the campaign that she and Franklin sometimes disagreed, but the real shocker was her announcement that she meant to keep—even if she became First Lady—the job she had held while Franklin had served as New York’s governor. During his four years in the Albany state house, Eleanor had traveled down to New York City to teach three days a week at her school on East Sixty-fifth Street, and she saw no reason why his transfer to Washington should alter her schedule or stop her from doing what she “enjoyed more than anything I have ever done.”1

  Such independence came late to Eleanor Roosevelt, after a childhood notable for its loneliness and lack of strong female models, and a marriage dominated for many years by her mother-in-law. The only daughter of an exceptionally beautiful woman, Eleanor had suffered greatly as a child when she heard herself described as an unattractive “Granny.” Nor did her confidence grow after her mother’s death when she and her younger brother, Hall, came under the control of a stern and distant grandmother. Only the erratic attentions of her bon vivant father saved that period from becoming, for Eleanor, an uninterrupted bad memory. Much later in her life, after she had married and had children of her own, she singled out the times spent with her father as the best of her life.2

  When his excessive drinking and playboy lifestyle led to an early death, those pleasant interludes abruptly ended and strict Grandmother Hall took an even larger role in Eleanor’s life until, at age fifteen, she was enrolled in a boarding school in England. There she met a strong, thinking, caring Parisian, Marie Souvestre, who had a powerful impact on her young student.3 “She gave me an intellectual curiosity and a standard of living which have never left me,” Eleanor wrote years later. “[On trips across Europe,] she did all the things that in a vague way you had always felt you wanted to do, enjoying the food and being comfortable but at the same time seeing how the people lived.”4

  Three years with Mademoiselle Souvestre
could hardly cancel out the fifteen years that went before, and Eleanor returned to New York to do the expected: make her début and marry at the first opportunity. Although she later admitted that at the time of her marriage, she had little idea of what loving or being a wife and mother meant, she quietly accepted the mold that had been cast for women of her class and time.

  Urbane and handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not have seen beauty or sophistication or confidence in his bride in 1905, but like many of the men who later became president, he made an advantageous marriage. In this respect he illustrates a remarkable pattern evident in presidents’ lives. Most of the men who later achieved the country’s highest office married up into socially or economically superior strata of American society, while the women married into more adventure, travel, or risk than they had found in their parents’ home. Franklin’s choice of his distant cousin was hardly social climbing, but the marriage helped him in two ways. As Joseph Lash, the Roosevelts’ biographer noted, young Franklin’s “dissemblings contrasted with Eleanor’s scrupulousness.” Lash concluded: “Perhaps she appealed to Franklin because he needed someone to temper his fun-loving, easygoing, frivolous side.”5 Another motive may have been working, at least subconsciously. Eleanor’s uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, then resided at the White House, and a politically ambitious young man—even one who intended to align with the Democrats—could do worse than marry the favorite niece of an immensely popular Republican president.

  For her part, Eleanor recognized the difficulty of fitting into Franklin’s world. His mother, with whom the couple lived, imperiously controlled the household; and Franklin’s friends, with their cigarette smoking and quick wit, made Eleanor so painfully aware of her rigid views and conversational inadequacies that she often begged to stay behind when he went out partying.